|
 |
About the Exhibition Images & Video  William Eggleston on Film Whitney Live In the News Credits |
"God Damn That's A Good Looking Blue": Winston Eggleston on William Eggleston
It's difficult to impossible to get William Eggleston to talk about his work much less his working style. In 2004 while preparing a film for ICP's Infinity Awards, I had the privilege to speak to Bill's youngest son Winston. Winston suspended his own photography career to be his father's photographic assistant. Winston and his brother took over running their father's archive in 1992, attempting to organize and catalog the entire body of work. Negatives were in different cities and many things were missing; there are many stories of boxes of prints vanishing after a late night of partying. Bill's generosity played a large role in giving away innumerable photographs.
During the interview, Winston provided a window into his father's life and background: he loves guns, but does not hunt; likes stamps, likes old rugs, and loves Bach. Most importantly Winston was able to impart the feeling of being along side his father while he photographed. He provides us with a context for each image and expresses an adoration of the photographs as only a son can.
Film and interview directed by: Douglas Sloan
Courtesy: Icontent Films and Intelligent Content.com
William Eggleston's great achievement in photography can be described in a straightforward way: he captures everyday moments and transforms them into indelible images. William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961-2008 presents a comprehensive selection from nearly fifty years of image-making.
Born in 1939 in Sumner, Mississippi, a small town in the Delta region, Eggleston showed an early interest in cameras and audio technology. While studying at various colleges in the South, he purchased his first camera and came across a copy of Henri Cartier-Bresson's book The Decisive Moment (1952). In the early 1960s, Eggleston married and moved to Memphis, where he has lived ever since. He first worked in black-and-white, but by the end of the decade began photographing primarily in color. Internationally acclaimed and widely traveled, Eggleston has spent the past four decades photographing all around the world, conveying intuitive responses to fleeting configurations of cultural signs and moods as specific expressions of local color. Psychologically complex and casually refined, bordering on kitsch and never conventionally beautiful, these photographs speak principally to the expanse of Eggleston's imagination and have had a pervasive influence on all aspects of visual culture. By not censoring, rarely editing, and always photographing, Eggleston convinces us of the idea of the democratic camera.
Impressed with a series of color slides that Eggleston showed him, in May 1976, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, mounted an exhibition of Eggleston’s photographs under the curatorial direction of John Szarkowski. In retrospect, the MoMA exhibition was a pivotal moment in the history of color photography, which had previously been encountered mainly in magazines and advertisements. Despite initial criticism, through the work of Eggleston and contemporaries such as Stephen Shore and Joel Meyerowitz, color photography came to be recognized as a legitimate artistic medium.
William Eggleston’s Guide is the publication that accompanied the show. The book’s title recalls the Michelin Guide, an appropriate choice since the pictures suggest an idiosyncratic travel guide to Eggleston’s South. The Guide is comprised of casual yet breathtaking photographs taken in and around Memphis and small Mississippi Delta towns in the early 1960s. Its format and layout are reminiscent of a family photo album, a fitting framework for his snapshot-like photographs, many depicting close friends and family. More than anything else, Eggleston's refined use of color in these images enables the observer to find a personal, emotional access to his pictures of fairly ordinary subjects.
14 Pictures is the first portfolio of Eggleston’s prints made using the dye transfer process, a key technique in achieving balance and saturation in color photography. Earlier methods for printing from color slides yielded prints in which color often appeared flat and lifeless. In 1974, Eggleston began experimenting with the dye transfer process, developed by Kodak in the mid-1940s, which allowed for the changing or intensification of individual hues. This in turn enriched the image’s pictorial—and often psychological—depth. “I don’t think anything has the seductivity of dyes,” Eggleston commented about the process. “By the time you get into all those dyes, it doesn’t look at all like the scene, which in some cases is what you want.”
Eggleston’s friends, curator Walter Hopps and fellow photographer John Gossage, helped him select the fourteen photographs for the portfolio since Eggleston had difficulty deciding which works to include. Eggleston has frequently looked to outside help in editing his work: “I don’t have any favorites. Every picture is equal but different.”
Throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s, Eggleston took several spontaneous meandering road trips with his friend, the curator Walter Hopps, leaving from Memphis and sometimes traveling as far as the Pacific coast. The photographs taken on these journeys comprise the Los Alamos series and present a vernacular view of the scene from the road. The title was inspired by one site the travelers passed, the Los Alamos National Laboratory near Santa Fe, New Mexico, where the atomic bomb had been developed.
In 1974, Eggleston gathered together about two thousand images, planning to produce a multivolume set of books with hundreds of original photographs. The project, however, remained unrealized because, as Eggleston later explained, he “had too many other things to do.” While some of the images actually pre-date those of the Guide, they were not published until thirty years later and this lag between execution and publication certainly influenced the editorial choices made in the publication process. The diverse photographs grouped into the Los Alamos series share a roving eye that tends to come up close and concentrate on a detail that becomes strange under the photographer’s intense gaze.
The seeming spontaneity and undeniable originality of Eggleston's well-known color photographs is equaled in the sounds and images of Stranded in Canton--rarely exhibited video footage shot in 1973–74 with a handheld camera in and around Memphis, the Delta, and New Orleans. The subjects of these wild videos were close friends, musicians, and denizens of Memphis's nightlife, captured unscripted in a documentary style.
In this exhibition, Stranded in Canton is presented in a setup similar to that devised by the artist for a 1976 exhibition at Yale's Calhoun College: composites screened on four monitors alongside a series of black-and-white portraits. These photographs feature many of the same subjects and locales as Eggleston's videos and were taken with a 5x7-inch view camera. Despite the low ambient light, Eggleston produced sharply focused yet softly illuminated portraits of Memphis's night owls.
The small towns of the Mississippi Delta have yielded many of Eggleston's most memorable images. Eggleston photographed the area’s familiar sights and ordinary activities: supermarkets, sidewalks, cars, dinner tables, gas stations, bars and their habitués. However, his commonplace subjects are pictured from unexpected points of view and illuminated by a brilliant variety of vernacular color. For Eggleston, everything in front of the camera was basically worthy of a picture, even if it appeared trivial or banal. He declares his intentions succinctly: “I am at war with the obvious.”
Just before the election of 1976, Eggleston received a commission from Rolling Stone magazine to photograph presidential candidate Jimmy Carter, his family, and their hometown of Plains, Georgia. Carter was away campaigning while Eggleston was there photographing, however, so none of the images show the politician. Although the magazine never printed the photographs, the following year Election Eve was published in two volumes containing one hundred chromogenic prints, taken in Plains and the surrounding area.
The publication’s format was based on Alexander Gardner’s 1865 two-volume Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the Civil War, which contained original albumen prints of sites, scenes, and people associated with the Civil War. More than a century later, Eggleston’s Election Eve presents the South as a place of flat fields, grand old trees, and dilapidated wooden structures interspersed with some signs of modernity, like oil tanks, or plastic flags blowing in the wind. Bypassing any overt references either to the violent war that divided the country or to the important southern Democrat, Eggleston’s images of the land tell their own story of past and present.
In 1983 Eggleston went to Graceland, Elvis’s Memphis mansion, to take photographs for a tourist guide. These photographs were published as the portfolio William Eggleston’s Graceland the following year. They reveal the house, which Elvis had furnished himself, as the mausoleum of a man with strange taste. The dye transfer prints seem to be soaked with artificial colors as they document a dizzying interior space of mirrors, thick carpets, and brassy ornamentation.
When asked fairly recently how he felt about Elvis, Eggleston responded, “I was never interested in Elvis. I’m still not.” This instinct to distance himself from association with an icon of Southern culture demonstrates Eggleston’s reluctance to identify himself with the South despite its stubborn recurrence as the subject of his work. Nevertheless, the bizarre content of the rooms dovetails well with Eggleston’s tendency to highlight awkward relationships between weird objects.
The Democratic Forest (1989) was the first commercially published monograph on the by-then legendary photographer since William Eggleston’s Guide in 1976. Considered by Eggleston to be one of his most important projects, its hundred and fifty images were culled from thousands of color prints taken in locations ranging from family land in Mississippi to Pittsburgh to the Berlin Wall. Largely devoid of people, they picture landscapes, cityscapes, buildings, and interiors.
Eggleston’s title refers to his working method: “I had this notion of what I called a democratic way of looking around: that nothing was more important or less important.” Every detail, no matter how insignificant, takes on meaning.